Pretty Baby

Great, I think. Just perfect. Heidi’s off chasing down homeless girls, but I’m the one who’s weird.

HEIDI

I don’t know if she drinks coffee or not, but I bring her a café mocha nonetheless, topped with extra whipped cream for good measure, the perfect pick-me-up for anyone who’s having a bad day. I get a scone to go with it, cinnamon chip, plus the “very berry” coffee cake, in case she doesn’t like cinnamon or scones. And then I scurry down the quiet, Saturday morning streets, elbows out, in a defensive position, ready to tackle anyone who gets in my way.

It’s raining, the April sky dark and disgruntled. The streets are saturated with puddles, which passing taxis soar through, sending rainwater flying into the air. Car lights are on, and, though it’s after 10:00 a.m., automatic streetlights have yet to register that nighttime has turned to day. My umbrella is up, keeping my hair dry though my lower half becomes soaked by puddles, by the surges of water that splash from the tires of passing cars. The rain cascades from the sky, and I chant to myself: It’s raining cats and dogs. It’s raining pitchforks and hammer handles. When it rains it pours.

She’s right where she said she’d be. Pacing up and down Fullerton, jouncing a desolate Ruby who screeches at the top of her lungs. Sopping wet. Onlookers—a handful of zealot joggers in water-repellant running gear—circumvent the scene, stepping onto Fullerton to risk their lives in oncoming traffic rather than assist Willow, the young girl who appears to have aged thirty years in the course of a single night, carrying the facial features of a middle-aged woman: dramatic creases on her face, baggage under the eyes. The whites of her eyes are red, the blood vessels of the sclera swollen. She trips over a crack in the sidewalk, tosses Ruby roughly over a shoulder, patting her back in a manner that verges on unkind. Shhh...shhhh, she says, but the words are not gentle, not pacific. What she means to say is shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

She bounces her angrily, as I remember willing myself not to do when Zoe was a baby, when her yowling kept me up all night long and it was all I could do not to lose control. I don’t know much about postpartum depression, personally, but the media is quick to spin sensationalist stories of unstable, disturbed women driven by the intrusive thoughts that jump unsolicited into their minds: thoughts of hurting their babies, of stabbing them or drowning them or throwing them down a flight of stairs. Thoughts of driving their minivan to the bottom of a retention pond with their children buckled safely in the backseat. I know there are women who, fearing they might hurt their babies, abandon their newborns instead, in an effort to avoid physical harm. I commend Willow for not leaving Ruby on the steps of a church or shelter, for not telling her to shut up when I know it’s exactly what she wants to say. The joggers look and frown—what is that girl doing with that baby?—but what I see is a tenacious girl with more gumption than half the grown women I know. Without my mother to complain to on the phone, without Chris to steal a hysterical Zoe from my arms when I’d had enough for one day, I’m not certain what I would have done, how I would have survived that first year of motherhood (though now knowing the perplexities of a twelve-year-old girl, infancy doesn’t seem so bad).

“I brought you coffee,” I say, sweeping up from behind and startling the girl. As if coffee will truly fix anything, steal her away from a life on the streets, provide any nourishment for her meager body. She is completely exhausted, her body heavy, her legs on the verge of collapse. I know without her having to tell me that she’s been pacing up and down Fullerton since the middle of the night, any effort to calm Ruby down. Her body is sleepy, though her eyes are rabid, like a dog in the furious stage of rabies: aggressive and ready to attack. There’s a loss of coordination, an irritability in the forceful way she snatches the cup from my hand, in the way she drops to the wet ground and devours both the cinnamon chip scone and the “very berry” coffee cake in a matter of moments.

“She’s been crying all night,” she says between mouthfuls, crumbs escaping the corners of her mouth and falling to the concrete, where she ambushes them and forces them back in. She tucks herself and Ruby into a doorway, under an indigo awning on the steps of an eclectic little shop with wind chimes and ceramic birds in the front window. The store is open, the contour of a woman watching us through the window, from afar.

“When is the last time she ate?” I ask, but Willow shakes her head, delirious.

“I don’t know. She won’t eat. Kept pushing the bottle out. Screaming.”

“She wouldn’t take the bottle?” I ask.

She shakes her head. She removes the top of the café mocha and begins lapping up the whipped cream with a tongue. Like a dog, lapping water from a bowl on the floor.

“Willow,” I say. She doesn’t look at me. There’s a rotten smell coming from her: clothing that has been soaked by rain—damp and filthy—days, maybe weeks, of body odor. An atrocious smell wafting from Ruby’s diaper. I peer up and down the street and wonder: where does Willow go to use the facilities? The employees at local restaurants and bars would shoo her away like a stray cat, a feral cat. I’ve seen signs plastered in storefront windows: No Public Restrooms. I think of the park, blocks away, and wonder if there’s a public toilet, a port-a-potty, anything for her to use? “Willow,” I start again, this time dropping to the concrete beside her. She watches me closely, cautiously, and scoots a bit away, regaining her three feet of personal space. But she claws the coffee, the microscopic pastry crumbs that remain in the soppy paper sack, in case I have the gall to steal them from her hand.

“Willow,” I say again, and then, “Would you let me hold Ruby?” finally forcing the words from my mouth. Oh, how I want to hold that baby in my arms, to feel the weight of her! I recall that wonderful baby smell from Zoe’s youth: a conglomeration of milk and baby powder, sour and unpleasant, and yet entirely delicious, wistful, nostalgic. What I’m expecting from Willow is a firm no, and so I’m taken aback by the ease with which she hands me the hysterical child. It’s not instantaneous, no. Not by any means. She scrutinizes me up and down: who is this woman and what does she want? But then, perhaps, some literary verse runs through her mind, some proverb about faith and trust and, as J. M. Barrie would say, pixie dust. She slips the child into my hands, grateful to be free of the thirteen or so pounds of body weight that hampered her all night, that must make her feel waterlogged, snowed over. Willow’s body relaxes, her bones sink into the cold concrete, her muscles slack against the glass door.

And in my arms, Ruby quiets. It has nothing to do with me, per se, but rather a change in position, new eyes to see, a smile. I collapse the umbrella and stand from the ground, protected, to some extent, from the elements beneath the indigo awning, and in my arms, sway her back and forth in a gentle lilt, humming. My mind time travels to Zoe’s baby nursery, pale purple damask sheets, the sleigh glider where I would sit for hours on end, rocking the tiny figure in my arms until long after she’d fallen asleep.

Ruby’s diaper alone must weigh ten pounds. She’s soaked through and through, urine and diarrhea seeping through a Onesies jumpsuit and onto my coat. Her jumpsuit, which used to be white, with the words Little Sister embroidered in a pastel thread, is caked with throw up and spit up, some milky white, others Technicolor yellow. She’s warm to the touch, her forehead radiating heat, her cheeks aglow. She’s running a fever.

“Ruby has a sister?” I inquire, trying, with the back of my hand to determine the baby’s temperature. 101. 102. I don’t want to alarm Willow and so I try to be sly, try to make small talk so she doesn’t see the way I press my lips to the forehead of the baby. 103?

“Huh?” Willow asks, turning white with confusion and I point out the jumpsuit, the lavender L, the salmon I, a pair of baby blue Ts and so forth.

A cyclist passes by on the street—bike wheels spinning wildly through puddles on the road—and Willow’s eyes turn to watch him: the red sweatshirt and black biker shorts, a gray helmet, a backpack, calf muscles that put my own to shame. The way the water mushrooms beneath the tires. “I got it at a thrift store,” she says, not looking at me, and I reply, “Of course.” Of course, I think. Where would the sister be?

I stroke a finger down Ruby’s cheek, feeling the soft, cherubic skin, staring into the innocent, ethereal eyes. The baby latches on to my index finger with her chubby little fist, the bones and veins tucked away under layers and layers of baby fat, the only time in one’s life when fat is adorable and heavenly. She plunges a finger into her mouth and sucks on it with a vengeance.

“I think she might be hungry,” I suggest—hopeful—but Willow says, “No. I tried. She wouldn’t eat.”

“I could try,” I offer, adding, “I know you’re tired,” careful not to usurp her role as the mother. The last thing in the world I want to do is offend Willow. But I know babies can be more confusing than preteen girls, more baffling than foreign politics and algebra. They want a bottle, they don’t want a bottle. They cry for absolutely no reason at all. The baby that devours pureed peas one day won’t touch them the next. “Whatever you think is best,” I say.

“Whatever,” she says, shrugging, indifferent. She hands me the one and only bottle she owns, filled with three or four ounces of formula, put together in the wee hours of morning. It’s curdled now and though I know Willow intends me to plunge this very bottle, this very formula, into Ruby’s cavernous mouth, I cannot. My hesitation makes the baby wail.

“Willow,” I say over the sound of Ruby’s hysterics.

She takes a drink of the coffee and flinches from the heat. “Huh?”

“Maybe I could wash out the bottle? Start again with fresh formula?”

Formula is horribly expensive. I remember. I used to cringe each and every time Zoe didn’t suck her baby bottles dry. When Zoe was born, I was a staunch believer in breastfeeding. The first seven months of her life, I relied on nothing but breast milk. I planned to do so for a year. But then things changed. Initially the doctor and I discounted the pain as an effect of childbirth. We went on as if all was normal.

But all was far from normal.

By then, I was pregnant again, pregnant with Juliet, though of course, there was no way to know at that point if she was a girl.

It had been less than six weeks since Juliet was conceived when the bleeding first began. By this time in her life, her heart was pumping blood and her facial features were taking form; arms and legs were about to emerge as tiny buds from her tiny body. I didn’t have a miscarriage; no, that, of course would have been too easy, too simple, for her to just die.

Instead, I made the decision to end my Juliet’s life.

Willow gives me a look that is hard to read. Wary and dubious, but also too tired to care. A handful of girls—college aged, in sweatshirts and flannel pants—pass by, huddled close together, arm in arm, under golf umbrellas and hoods, giggling, recalling hazy, drunken memories of last night. I overhear words: jungle, juice, pink, panty, droppers. I look down at my own attire and recall the purple robe.

“Whatever,” she says again, her eyes following the coeds until they round the corner, their laughter still audible in the slumberous city.

And so I hand the quivering child back to Willow and, releasing my umbrella, scurry to the nearest Walgreens where I pick up a bottle of water from the shelf and acetaminophen drops. Something to bring that temperature down.

When I return to our little alcove, I dump the used formula on the street, watching as it races into the nearest storm drain, then rinse out the bottle and start anew. Willow hands me the coveted formula powder and I mix up a bottle, and she returns Ruby to my arms. I plunge the bottle into the baby’s expectant mouth—full of hope that this will quiet the hysterical child—but she thrusts it out with a horrified look, as if I’d slipped formula laced with arsenic into her mouth.

And then she begins to scream.

“Shh...shh,” I beg, bouncing her up and down and I remind myself—already tired, already frustrated—that Willow did this all night. All night long. Alone. Cold. Hungry. And I wonder: Scared? Lightning flashes in the not-so-far distance, and I count in my head: One. Two. Three. Thunder crashes, loud and angry, full of wrath. Willow staggers, searching the heavens for the source of the jarring noise and I see in the way her eyes dilate that she’s scared. Scared of thunder, like a child. “It’s okay,” I hear myself say aloud to Willow, and instantly I’m transported back in time to Zoe’s preschool bedroom, cradling her body in my arms while she nuzzled her head into me. “It’s okay,” I say to her, “it’s only thunder. It won’t hurt you one bit. Not one bit at all,” and I see Willow staring at me, though the look in her blue eyes is impossible to read.

I’m absolutely soaking wet, as are Willow and Ruby, and the woman in the shop has the audacity to knock curtly on the glass door and tell us to go away. No loitering, her lips say.

“What now?” I ask myself aloud, and Willow responds in a hushed voice, more to herself than me: “Tomorrow is a new day,” she says, “with no mistakes in it yet.”

“Anne of Green Gables?” I ask and she says, “Yes.”

“Your favorite?” I ask, and she says that it is.

I’m slow to move, to draw Willow and her leather suitcase from the safety of the indigo awning and into the rain. “I bought a copy of Anne of Green Gables,” I confess. “On the way home last night. I’ve never read it before. I always wanted to read it. With my daughter, with Zoe. But she grew up too fast for it,” I say. It was as if I merely blinked, and the baby girl I once read board books to was suddenly too old to share a book with me, with her mother, because then, what would her friends at school think? It would be embarrassing if they knew, or so Zoe assumes.

A thought crosses my mind, as it often does in moments like this: if I had to do it all over, what would I do differently? If Zoe could be a baby again, a toddler, how would I be different? How would Zoe be different? Would things have been different with Juliet?

But of course, the question is entirely null and void, seeing as how there would be no more children for Chris and me.

“Did you and your mother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, wondering if she will humor me with this tidbit of personal information.

Hesitantly, she answers, “Matthew.”

“Matthew?” I repeat, worried that her confession will end there, with that one word.

But to my surprise she continues, the dark bangs shrouding her eyes as she watches a robin hunt for worms on the street. The first sign of spring. There are tiny buds on the trees that line the city streets, crocus shoots poking through holes in the sodden ground. “Matthew, my...” And she hesitates—there’s a distinct hesitation before she says, “my brother,” and outwardly I nod, but inwardly my heart leaps. One piece of the puzzle. Willow has a brother named Matthew. Willow has a brother, at all. A brother who read Anne of Green Gables.

“Your brother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, trying to ignore the peculiarity of it, of Willow reading a book such as Anne of Green Gables with her brother, a book that a mother and daughter should share. I want to ask her about her mother. About why she didn’t read the book with her mother. But instead, I say nothing.

“Yes.”

I see a wistfulness come over her when she mentions her brother. Matthew. A tinge of sadness, a mournful sigh.

I wonder about this Matthew and where he may be.

And then Ruby’s bloodcurdling scream makes me remember the acetaminophen. I tread lightly. “I think Ruby is running a fever,” I say. “I bought some Tylenol at the store. It might help.” I hand Willow the box so that she can see it is, in fact, Tylenol, that I’m not trying to drug her baby.

Willow looks at me with concern in her eyes and her voice becomes that of a child. “She’s sick?” she asks, her own naïveté showing through.

“I don’t know.”

But I see that the baby is a drooling, boogery mess. Willow concedes to the Tylenol and I read the directions for the dosage. Willow holds Ruby while I squeeze the berry flavor medicine into her mouth, and we watch as Ruby goes silent, and then smacks her lips together. It’s yummy, the Tylenol. And then we wait for the medicine to kick in, for Ruby to stop crying. We wait and think. Think and wait. Wait and think. Think and wait.

What will I do when Ruby does, if ever, stop crying? Say goodbye and return home? Leave Ruby and Willow here, in the rain?

With the diarrhea soaked diaper, a red, swollen, boiled and blistered diaper rash on her genitalia and buttocks (as I imagine there to be, hiding beneath the diaper). That, alone, would make me scream.

“When’s the last time she saw a doctor?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” says Willow.

“You don’t know?” I ask, taken by surprise.

“I don’t remember,” she corrects.

“We could take her to the doctor.”

“No.”

“I could pay. For the bill. Medicine.”

“No.”

“Then a shelter. Protection from the elements. A good night’s sleep.”

“I don’t do shelters,” she says again—a replay of last night in the diner—the tone of her voice hammering the message home. I. Do. Not. Do. Shelters. I can’t blame her. I, myself, would think long and hard before checking into a homeless shelter. Shelters themselves can be dangerous places, brimming with desperate men and women, turned by circumstance into violent predators. There are communicable diseases in shelters: tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV, and, sometimes, the homeless are not allowed to bring their personal possessions inside. Which means, abandoning Willow’s vintage suitcase and whatever treasures it may hold. There are drugs in shelters, drug addicts, drug dealers, there are infestations of lice and bed bugs, there are people who will steal the shoes from your feet while you sleep. In the coldest months, people wait in line for hours to be assured a bed in a shelter. And even then, there may or may not be space.

“Willow,” I say. There’s so much I want to say. The “L” comes soaring in on the tracks above us, drowning out the sound of my voice. I hesitate, wait for it to pass and then say, “You can’t stay out here forever. There are things Ruby needs. Things you need.”

She looks at me with those cornflower eyes, her skin drab, remnants of eye makeup intensifying the baggage beneath her eyes. “You think I want to live on the streets?” she asks. And then says to me, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

CHRIS

The front door opens and there they stand like two drowned rats. There’s a baby in Heidi’s arms, a scent far worse than cumin wafting from the girl. I rub at my eyes, certain I’m hallucinating, certain my Heidi would never bring a homeless girl into our home, into the home where her own daughter lives and breathes. The girl is a ragamuffin, a street urchin. She’s barely older than Zoe. She won’t make eye contact with me, not when Heidi tells me her name is Willow or when I say lackadaisically (I don’t want to appear too stupid when the cameramen appear to inform me that I’m on the next installment of Candid Camera) that mine is Chris.

Heidi announces, “She’s going to stay with us tonight,” just like that. Like those damn kittens, and I’m too stupefied to say yes or no, not that anyone bothered to ask my opinion. Heidi shepherds the girl into our home, and suggests she remove the soused boots from her feet, and as she does so, about a gallon of water pours from their insides and onto the floor. Beneath those boots, her feet are bare. No socks, her feet macerated and covered in blisters. I wince, and Heidi and the girl’s eyes follow mine down to the bare feet. I know Heidi’s thinking about how to remedy the girl’s ailing feet, but I’m just hoping whatever she’s got isn’t contagious.

Zoe appears from her bedroom, the words “what the...” dropping from a gaping mouth. I’m guessing our daughter isn’t overly familiar with the f word that follows that statement, so I nearly say it aloud for her. What the fuck are you thinking, Heidi? But already Heidi is showing the girl into our home, introducing her to our daughter, who stares dumbly at this waif and then looks to me for an explanation. I can only shrug.

The girl’s eyes get lost on the TV, on some basketball game: Chicago Bulls versus the Pistons, and I hear myself ask—for lack of anything better to say—“You like basketball?” and she flatly answers, “No,” and yet she’s staring at that TV as though she’s never seen an electrical appliance before in her life. When she talks, I catch a scent of bacteria fermenting in her mouth: halitosis. I wonder when she last brushed her teeth. They’ve probably got that “fuzzy sweater” thing going on. There’s an ungodly smell coming from her and when I move to the window and open it a crack, Heidi shoots me an evil eye, to which I reply, “What? It’s stuffy in here,” and hope the rain stays at bay long enough to air out the stench.

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